Jaguars owner puts team on notice after last year's late-season collapse

From Week 1 up until Thanksgiving, the Jacksonville Jaguars looked like runaway favorites to win the AFC South and make some noise once the playoffs rolled around.

The team was 8-3, sporting back-to-back wins over division rivals and five of the last six games on its schedule were winnable. But a four-game losing streak, and losses in five of those six games, kept the Jags from the postseason and handed the division crown to the upstart Houston Texans.

And while the Jaguars dealt with several key injuries during that losing stretch (quarterback Trevor Lawrence, receivers Christian Kirk and Zay Jones), owner Shad Khan believes the end-of-season meltdown had more to do with the team’s leadership than not having enough healthy players.

“Injuries are a part of the game,” Khan said , via the Associated Press. “We had some of those injuries, but I think it's organizational failure that it happened. All of these players I talked to, it's like how could this happen? What happened? For me, it's really a cause for self-reflection and then something good to come out of it because we just can't have that this year. For us, winning now is the expectation.”

Khan’s declaration of winning being the new bar by which the team will be judged may be a bit ambitious. Jacksonville has had just two winning seasons in the last six years and three in the last 16 years.

The team's collapse was talked about ad nauseam once the regular season ended, with many analysts pointing the finger at people at the top, much like Khan.

While Jacksonville’s 9-8 record last year technically constituted a winning season, and it’s identical to the team’s record the year before when it won the division, the way both years ended alter how each is perceived.

The Jaguars started the 2022 season 3-7 but won six of their last seven and reeled off a five-game win streak to close out the year and cruise past the Tennessee Titans to clinch the AFC South. There was plenty to feel good about heading into 2023.

But last year, the exact opposite happened, and the Jaguars couldn’t get out of their own way in the final third of the year. They finished as the only team (of eight) to be as many as five games over .500 heading into December and not make the playoffs — something Khan deemed unacceptable.